Designing the Object Game: Collaborative reflections and knowledge sharing in action

The Object Game is an exploratory design game and an experiment of
developing a tangible object that can spark dialogue and retrospection
between collaborative partners and act as a boundary object. The objective
of this article is to show and elaborate on the development of the Object
Game, and to provide case examples of the game in action. The Object Game
has two parts – Story-building and Co-rating of objects – with the aim of
stimulating a collaborative reflection on knowledge sharing with different
objects. In Story-building, the participants visualize their knowledge sharing
process with Story-cards by taking the outset in the five meta-objects –
Project Proposals, PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, Meeting places, and
an object of own choice. In Co-rating of objects, the participants engage in a
dialogue and collaboratively rate each of the five meta-objects in relation to
how these facilitated knowledge transfer, knowledge exchange, knowledge
generation, and knowledge integration. The participants collaborative
reflected on their use of different objects for knowledge sharing and learn
which objects have been effective (and which have not been effective) in their
collaborative innovation project. Finally, we look ahead to the design of a Coalignment
game – a future-oriented Object Game playing with possible
futures.